


Noise and Speech

by 13thSyndicate



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Alternate Canon Interpretation, Canon Compliant, Gen, Joshua is a Power, Neku is a wizard, Ordeals, They make their friendship work, Wizard AU, Young wizards au, aftermath of canon, ish?, powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 18:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10519029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13thSyndicate/pseuds/13thSyndicate
Summary: In the aftermath of three weeks of death, life (and Life) look a little different. To a wizard fully open, Shibuya sings in a cutting-edge melody.Sometimes, the Ordeal is less about changing the world, than changing the wizard. All is  done for each; the world ends with you.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It's all Lazchan's fault, I promise. Sorry for the use of Google Translate Japanese - I did my best to make sure it came out at least similar to how it's supposed to be without anyone fluent to check my work.

It was odd, when he woke up in bed to the sound of his alarm, slowly, with a sense of annoyance and drowsiness, rather than suddenly and with the sounds of Shibuya ringing in his ears all around him. Even odder when someone greeted him on the street as he pushed through - it almost caused him to jump, whip his head around, trip over his own feet as the only thought that could pass through his mind was 'Reaper'. Somehow, he managed to keep both balance and calm, reminding himself that Shibuya was the same, that this was real life and not the deadly Game of survival versus cessation. Adjusting back to normal life was... intense.

Yet, even odder still were the words ringing through the back of his head like the tune to an old, half-forgotten song. Shibuya thrummed with life and harmony in ways he'd never understood before. He could almost -feel- the jarring, pulsing rhythm beneath his feet, hundreds and hundreds of tracks overlaid against each other - skyscrapers and crosswalks and street signs all crying out, as loudly and lively as possible, _"Hello, we're here, we live, we breathe, **WE ARE ALIVE** "_ into the great unknown, singing endless defiance against rule, against order, against the subtle darkness that crept and clung and strangles individual thought-

Neku closed his eyes, shook his head, and tried not to hear. Slowly the music died around him, back to its dull background war. If he went back to his headphones... but no. He'd promised himself he would actually listen to the song of Life and the voices of Shibuya. That promise, a promise which echoed a larger Oath... but he couldn't think about that either. The school day was beginning, and he couldn't afford to space out now.

It was strange, to go to normal school again. After everything he'd been through, it should've been boring, but the lessons he'd learned along the way had shown him a certain kind of spice in the mundane (now if only he could stop making puns in his head, about food and math and music). It was that magic he'd sworn to protect - he knew that now. Shibuya was, in its own way, just a huge spell constantly running, playing out, coming to Knot... and right back around into infinity again, spiralling off into new branches and incarnations that could be spoken in a single word of the Speech, but not a hundred in any human language. The singing at the back of his mind whispered that word to him, and he smiled to himself; it took him a moment of self-control to keep him from sketching it onto his worksheet in its incomplete, pictorial form.

Sketching anything in general was more difficult to restrain himself from nowadays. Though the whispering in the back of his head was a song, the melody of Shibuya and the Powers that lived within and around and above it, the way it worked itself out through his hands was in drawings. Of course he knew spell diagrams, balancing equations, the world of math and reason, the same as any other wizard (man, that still sounded like such a trip, like something that wasn't even real). Still, every wizard had his (or her) specialty, and art was the earliest form of language. It was still... kind of odd, to him, to look at his pins with an open mind and see the underlying structures bound up in physical form. You just weren't supposed to be able to _do_ that with art, with reality, but...

School went by in a daze like always. It was getting better, and he knew from the homework he did later that whatever he was doing on a conscious level, somewhere his head was absorbing the information, but his mind couldn't focus when it buzzed with information, inspiration, memory of everything that had happened.

There were moments where he felt he could still look up and see mocking violet eyes across a black room, feel cold metal in his hands. He'd stared across the room into Joshua's cold eyes, the eyes of a Power dangerously close to having nothing left to lose. And words ringing through his mind - all jumbled together, the sum of all his lessons and experiences in that three-week time period. Shiki, congratulating him on using her name; Beat, exclaiming their friendship. A single voice, telling him, with an ironic quirk, "Give up on yourself, and you give up on the world", and Mr. H waxing on about one's world ending with oneself, and echoes of 'all is done for each', resonating in his brain, and below and above and around and through, a few simple lines he could swear he'd found resonating in a CAT mural one lazy afternoon, only a few days before he'd died. Words which had changed him, words to define his life.

**_Seimei no namae; Seimei no tame ni_ -  
** _(In Life's name; for Life's sake)_

**_\- kyōfu no kawarini yūki o erabi, jinsei no kawarini shi o erabu -  
_ ** _(I will choose courage over fear, I will choose life over death)_

**_Uchū no owari made.  
_ ** _(To Universe's end)_

He had heard, in the echoing stillness, another voice - a Voice too smug even to be Joshua's arrogant tones. A Voice which called out from the silence and gloated over the humbling of an old Enemy, bound into the form of a single, arrogant once-mortal who'd borne this small corner of the World on his shoulders for too long. Neku couldn't say exactly what it was he'd realized in those moments, other than that Joshua's death wouldn't save Shibuya, that this was not the way things were supposed to go, that the darkness was leaning in and waiting, eagerly, wanting, -cheering- for him to shoot... and he'd taken all his natural stubbornness, everything that hated doing what anyone else wanted him to do, every ounce of 'fuck off' he had in his entire body... and summoned an image of Joshua as he'd been through a dizzying week. Not of the crude and smug smiles and playful innuendoes, but the deeper meanings. The slight, sarcastic, bitter edge honed to cut on an insult directed against one who pierced the armor. The weariness in a voice tired of insults. The wistful longing he tried so hard to hide as he spoke of just how much of a _mess_ Shibuya was.

This boy – this Player – this _God_ – had been his friend. They'd seen something they loved in Shibuya. There'd been a kinship there a long time before they'd met for real. Even as Neku set a pencil to paper and began to work Speech with lines, he understood that.

Sometimes, when he listened closely to Shibuya's voices in his head, one of them sounded a tad familiar. And while the idea of _that_ particular Power lurking at the back of his mind was enough to send him into a froth of annoyance, it also made a certain amount of sense. If Shibuya were speaking to him, well, how could that voice not be there? 

Music hummed inside him. He knew Josh had no direct handling of the Voices, but they were the Voices of the city. He closed his eyes, gripped his pencil, and began to sketch.

He sketched the city. Shibuya was the Voices and the Voices were Shibuya. That's how it worked - all those voices he could hear from the crosswalks and streets an signs and skyscraper, singing in defiance of that darkness he'd seen lurking to swallow Joshua whole, one more Power snuffed out like a star extinguished. In every building was a note of the song in his mind, symbols and abstract glyphs that could be seen or heard (even some humans can see sound and hear color; to the Speech, synaesthesia is simply a matter of the proper declensions) when read from just the right angle by someone with just the right talents. A message, for Someone who may or may not be listening. Welcome was written into the signs, and smaller words for someone with the patience to untangle them from stroke and hatching, not unlike a mural he'd been standing in front of one sunny afternoon - two sunny afternoons - when his life had changed completely. First because of a few simple words, and the second because of a brush with What was bigger than he was.

He found himself smiling as he worked words into textures that bloomed with soul.

Shibuya was the same city as always. Full of noise and vibrant clashing that was discord and harmony all rolled into one. It was him that had changed - that now had the ears to hear, the eyes to see.

_"Same streets.... same crowds too. Yeah... Shibuya hasn't changed a bit."_

**Author's Note:**

> It's not every wizard whose Ordeal involves talking a Power down from a proverbial ledge. When Neku manages to stop feeling bone-shakingly tired and in awe of that fact, he'll have time to be proper annoyed that his Ordeal was basically all about Joshua.
> 
> Josh is, of course, never going to let him fucking forget it.


End file.
